When you were five-years-old, your mind couldn’t fathom a day when you wouldn’t want your trusty teddy by your side. A brand new gift at the holidays, he went with you everywhere. As you grew older, you didn’t appreciate your comfort object less, but there was a use lifecycle that dwindled and required less and less use over time; until it was time to put your teddy on a shelf somewhere, eventually to be packed away in a box when you moved out of the house.

The technology application lifecycle follows a similar path to that treasured teddy bear. Much excitement and frenzy often accompanies the application launch. Workmanship, pride and promise fill the application’s beginning as it seeks to solve a problem in a new way for users. Intense research, design and development goes into the production of the application before its launch. If all goes well, the next step in the cycle is adoption of the masses as the product grows and adapts to user use.

Even the most popular applications, however, likely have a decline and end-of-life stage as new technology, new research and new development works to solve the problem in new ways. Managing this end-of-life-stage of the application can be a difficult time as the team works toward new and exciting ideas while trying to manage the waning application.

As this mature application heads toward a likely, eventual retirement, the IT team isn’t ready to pull the plug entirely; yet doesn’t want to spend precious time and resources managing an application whose use is decreasing.

Virual Datacenters can be a handy tool to use in this situation. By migrating the waning product to Bluelock VDCs, resources, including capacity, can be gradually turned down to the point of being turned off when necessary. Because Bluelock VDCs can be complemented with Managed Services your team can offload a significant portion of the maintenance efforts to the Bluelock team.

Virtual Datacenters for end-of-life applications help to solve tough problems about how much time and energy to put toward an application with a declining-use future without having to invest large amounts of infrastructure capital, time or energy.

This blog is the fourth in a series of four counting down popular uses for Virtual Datacenters. For more information about common uses for Virtual Datacenters, click here.